CIA Has Removed 7 Files From CREST

Short version: CIA recently posted and quickly pulled down seven documents in its online archive CREST. They don’t appear to be anywhere else online. Further down you’ll find info on each of these missing documents, including screenshots of three landing pages.

Long version: The CIA’s CREST archive contains more than 12 million pages of formerly classified documents that are 25 years or older. Because of Executive Order 13526 (and its predecessors), at the 25-year mark, nonexempt documents of “permanent historical value” are automatically declassified whether they’ve been reviewed or not. Then they’re put into CREST, which has been available online since January 2017.

But sometimes documents get pulled down.

In April 2018, CIA posted documents from 1992 and January 1993. By late May, seven of those documents had been pulled offline. Three of them, possibly four, are about President George H.W. Bush’s final visit to CIA. Another concerns the Central Employee Activities Fund. The other two documents are videos having to do with “Hubble” and “Lagoon.”

The disappearance was noticed by French investigative journalist Jean-Marc Manach, who uses a script to monitor documents being added to CIA’s “Electronic Reading Room,” which includes FOIA releases and CREST. In late May, the script indicated that some CREST files had been pulled down. He searched online, but the documents weren’t anywhere, including Google’s cache and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. But Manach did find the landing pages for three of those documents in Bing’s cache.

Manach notified Michael Morisy of Muckrock, who kindly passed the email to me. I likewise couldn’t find the missing documents anywhere, and could find only those three landing pages. With Manach’s permission, I’m going to pass along what is known about the missing docs.

If anyone happened to download any of these documents, please send them along. I’m filing a series of FOIA requests for them, but don’t count on that working.

Info About the Files

Here’s everything that Manach’s script told him about the missing files, plus links and screenshots for the three pages in Bing’s cache.

Note: Unfortunately, the Bing and Google caches let their copies of webpages expire after those pages disappear. The idea behind the caches is not to keep permanent mirrors of every webpage (a la the Wayback Machine) but just to let you access a webpage if it happens to be temporarily unreachable at the moment you want to view it. Once a webpage has been gone for a while, the cached copy goes bye-bye too.

Bing’s cache expires even more quickly than Google’s, and as I write this, two of the cached landing pages are already gone. The cached landing page for the second file still exists at this moment, so — using my thinking cap — I mirrored it in the Wayback Machine.

A Harvard University professor and writer for The New Yorker is asking a court to order the release of records detailing 1971 grand jury investigations into the leak of the Pentagon Papers. https://t.co/M9aU9GmI04